Facing Drag
Gender Bending and Racialized Masking in Performing Arts and Popular Culture
Evelyn Annuß, Raz Weiner (eds.)
Facing Drag brings together international experts from fields like history, media, theatre, and performance studies to explore how gender, race, and ethnicity are impersonated across time and cultures. Using diverse case studies, the volume examines acts of crossing, appropriation, and re-signification in performance, highlighting their political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. It expands the concept of drag beyond gender bending, investigating its intersections with racialization and colonial histories. The essays offer critical insights into both the subversive potential of drag and its entanglement with violent forms of othering and exclusion.
With contributions from Evelyn Annuß, nora chipaumire, Sam Ehrentraut, Zimitri Erasmus, Elaine S. Frantz, Aurélie Godet, Karin Harrasser, Nanna Heidenreich, Katrin Köppert, Eric Lott, Julia Ostwald, Jay Pather and Raz Weiner.
Metadaten
Publication: Fall 2025
About the author
Evelyn Annuß
is professor of gender studies and director of the International Research Center Gender and Performativity (ICGP) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Her work engages the intersections of aesthetics, theories of performativity, and political critique. As a scholar of theater and literature, she focuses on political spectacle, and in particular on its historicity and mediality in contexts of National Socialism, colonial racisms, and (re)fascization.
Raz Weiner (Dr.) is a scholar of performance studies, politics, and embodiment. His work focuses on traditions, archives and contemporary forms of colonialism, racialisation and queerness, the production of bodies and knowledge, and the co-constitution of human societies and digital worlds. Before becoming a guest lecturer (2024) and research fellow (2023) at mdw, he was based in the School of Politics and IR at Queen Mary University in London (2020-2022) and the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at The Technion in Haifa (2021-2023).
